


Yield No Epitaphs

by lonelywalker



Category: The Art of Fielding - Chad Harbach
Genre: AU, F/M, Heart Attacks, M/M, POV Alternating
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-12
Updated: 2013-01-12
Packaged: 2017-11-25 05:42:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,909
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/635692
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lonelywalker/pseuds/lonelywalker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Henry's dead. How can his friends go on living?</p><p>Spoilers for the entire novel.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Yield No Epitaphs

Affenlight sat down heavily on the rug at the center of the room. His pants and shirtfront were drenched with water and he didn’t want to ruin Owen’s lovely rose-colored chair. It came to him as he sat there, his throat raw and mouth bitter, that the rug was Owen’s too. His fingers picked at the vaguely circular splotches where milk had once been splattered, where he and Henry had once knelt, gingerly picking glass shards from the floor… How long ago had that been? Six weeks? Two months since Owen was in the hospital? Owen’s cheek was healed now, bearing not even a bruise, but the glass was still broken.

The now-familiar pain throbbed in his shoulder. He grimaced, flexed, but knew without looking that his cigarettes had been soaked through with the rest of his clothes. The pain was just a pulled muscle or a stitch, albeit by his collarbone rather than his side, or perhaps entirely psychosomatic… The barest thought of the other possible reasons for his discomfort made him want to vomit again, not that he’d eaten anything to warrant it. His other hand clenched his phone.

He stared at it, almost uncomprehending. The world had, for a few minutes, seemed to narrow to the walls of Phumber 405. He had seemed entirely, unbearably alone. But he could call someone, cry out. He’d made the call he had to, of course. He’d been able to do that no matter how shocked and sickened he was. It was something he’d had drummed into him since he was a child. But now he could call… who? Campus security? They’d come, raising all hell on the way, and he flinched at the thought. Now he only wanted calm, quiet, a child’s security. If his clothes hadn’t been so wet, he might have just climbed into Owen’s bed, wrapped himself in those soft sheets and their reassuring scent, and fallen asleep.

His thumb hit the Recent Calls button. Owen was top of the list. He was also far, far away, in South Carolina, probably celebrating a victory or, more likely, quietly smiling as he paged through reading material for his upcoming finals. Perhaps he was already asleep, although it wasn’t that late, was it? The quad outside the window was dark, the staircase outside quiet. He’d lost track of time.

Owen didn’t have to know. Not now. But Affenlight’s shoulder throbbed and his stomach tightened, and the idea of _not_ calling him, not having _someone_ comfort him, the way he knew he should be comforting Owen and the entire campus, was too much to bear.

He pressed the Call button and squeezed his eyes closed against the pain, holding the phone to his ear.

***

“I’m going to get a Coke,” Ajay said, pulling on his jacket. “You want something?”

Owen looked up from his copy of _Fear and Trembling_ , which he was reading on his hotel bed. “I’m fine, thanks.”

Ajay nodded and disappeared, softly closing the hotel room door behind him. They were two to a room for this tournament, and while Owen usually shared with Henry and one of the younger students, Ajay had turned out to be a very good – which was to say quiet – roommate. Further along the corridor, he had no doubt that Adam and Rick and some of the others were partaking of more alcohol than was probably healthy for people who still had a championship game to play tomorrow.

His phone trilled. Owen looked at the caller ID and frowned slightly. It was unlike Guert to call him while he was away, but perhaps there was some sort of problem with his flight… “Hello?”

“Hey O.” The voice was faint, hoarse.

“Guert? You sound terrible.”

Nothing. Owen clapped his book closed. “Are you all right? Did you check on Henry?”

He’d called the room phone as soon as he’d finished speaking to Guert a couple of hours ago, but Henry naturally hadn’t picked up. That hadn’t seemed ominous at all, even if Henry hadn’t been in the best state of mind over the last couple of weeks. Owen had left food in the room and asked Guert to look in on him.

“I… yes.”

Guert was usually so unfailingly cheerful, or at the very least eloquent, that something started to churn in Owen’s stomach. He sat up, glad for the moment that Ajay had stepped out. “Where are you?”

He could hear the breath Guert took. “I’m in your room.”

“Henry isn’t there?”

It was as though they were playing a bizarre logic game. Fill in the blanks, Owen, work it out. “He’s, uh… He’s in the bathroom.”

“Oh.” That seemed reasonable enough, if he didn’t take into account the way every word from Guert sounded like agony. “Is he okay?” Maybe Guert had finally got Henry to eat something and he was throwing up. That happened sometimes.

“No.”

Dread started to seep in at the edges. Owen bit his lip and eased off the bed, standing up. Where was Mike? Mike was the nearest thing to a responsible adult he could think of, and he was reasonably sure both he and Guert needed a responsible adult.

He made himself breathe. “Guert. Tell me what happened. Please.”

“I’m so sorry…” Take away Guert’s cultured voice and he sounded like a little kid, like one of the boys who lived next door to Owen’s mother in San Jose. “I should’ve come sooner. I just…”

He hated every single one of the miles that separated him from Westish at that very moment. “It’s not your fault. But I need you to tell me what happened.”

“Nothing happened,” Guert said. “Henry’s dead.”

Owen swallowed and made himself breathe. There would be time to properly process those two words later and what they meant, what they really meant, but for the moment Guert needed him. “He’s… he was dead when you got there?”

“He was in the bathtub. I don’t know… the water was cold. I tried, but...”

“You need to call an ambulance.” He tried to remember the number for the Steves across the hall. Same as theirs but 406 instead of 405?

“I did. I’m just… waiting.”

“Guert…” He searched for something to say. Something that was as like a hug as it could be from hundreds of miles away. Every option came up short. “Are you all right?”

He listened to Guert breathe for far too long. “I don’t know. My shoulder hurts.”

That seemed like nothing, but it was entirely unlike Guert to mention something that was nothing. Owen pushed open the hotel room door and set off barefoot down the corridor. “Guert, stay on the phone with me, okay? At least until the paramedics get there.”

He opened one door and looked in on a surprised Phil Loondorf and Rick O’Shea. The next one revealed Mike and Arsch, both ready for bed. Arsch took one look at him and waved a toothbrush. “I’ll be in the bathroom.”

Mike raised his eyebrows.

“Mike…” Owen quickly understood just how hard it was to say. “I need you to call Pella.”

“Pella? Why?”

“Tell her she needs to go to Henry’s room right now, I mean _drop everything_ right now. Her dad needs her.”

Instead of dialing on his own phone, Mike was still staring at him. “Her dad? President Affenlight’s in Henry’s room? Buddha, I’m not following. What’s going on?”

He felt sick, dizzy, as though the world were about to spin and dump him on the floor. Still, in this suddenly vertiginous world, it was all too clear that there was never going to be a good way to break this news. “Henry’s dead. But Guert’s alive and I’m worried about him. I need Pella to go look after him and I don’t have her number and she probably wouldn’t talk to me if I did.”

Mike picked up his phone from the bed. “Henry’s dead?” he repeated.

Owen nodded.

***

Pella was at the edge of the quad when her phone rang, ready to leave campus and head home to study another set of library books, avoid her roommates, and perhaps consider phoning her father. She eased it out of her pocket: Mike. It took her a moment to remember what things were even like between the two of them, she’d had so many arguments and reconciliations with him that had only ever taken place in her head. But really he hadn’t said a word to her since that afternoon in Henry’s room. And wasn’t he supposed to be off with the team, playing some big tournament somewhere?

She thumbed Accept, bracing herself for one of many possible tirades. “Yes?”

“Pella.” His voice was soft, quiet. “Where are you?”

“I’m…” She looked around. “I’m on campus. What’s up? Where are you?”

“You need to go to Henry’s room. Phumber 405. You know where that is, right?”

Pella felt a flush of anger. Of course she knew where Henry’s room was. “I’m not in the mood for your bullshit. If you want anyone to fuck your boyfriend for you, ask my dad. He seems to actually _like_ that stupid game.”

“Pella?” A different voice: Owen. “Please. Guert called me. He’s in Henry’s room and he really needs you.”

She stopped walking. It took a moment for cynical thought to override her basic instinct to help and protect her dad no matter what. “He called you because he needs _me_?”

“You’re his daughter,” Owen said patiently. “He would never think of asking you for help.”

Pella wanted to be angry, to be absolutely furious at Owen for telling her what to do, at her dad for calling Owen, who was really just some _kid_ , instead of her. But there was a note of panic in Owen’s voice she’d never heard before. And really, if this was a stupid joke, she could probably live it down…

She started to jog back toward Phumber.

“Pella?”

“I’m going. I was just _there_. Jesus!”

Mike was back on the line. She could hear Owen talking faintly in the background. “Tell us when you get there, okay?”

“Okay, fine.” She didn’t really like him listening to her puff up all those flights of stairs, but tough. They weren’t even together anymore.

On the top landing, the chowder she’d left was still sitting there outside 405, untouched. Waste of good food. She pushed down on the door handle, expecting her dad and Henry to be standing there, ready to explain everything… or maybe just Henry, baffled about why she was even in the building.

But inside the room there was just her dad, sitting on the floor between the two beds, his shirtfront dark with water. He looked drained, exhausted, paler than he ever should have been. “Okay,” she said to Mike in an absent whisper. “I’m here.”

She set the phone on Owen’s bed, crouching down as her father looked at her with vacant eyes. His hair was wet with sweat or even more water, and he stank… No, actually the entire room stank of fetid soup and vomit and…

“What happened? Where’s Henry?”

The window, at least, was open, but that didn’t explain why her dad was soaked through, or why he was sitting on the floor looking so ill. She stepped over him, looking around, going to the half-open bathroom door.

“Pella, don’t…”

She’d thought of him as a marble statue once: pale and perfectly muscled. Now that paleness made bile rise in her throat. The bathroom floor was flooded and Henry was at the center of it, limbs spread, face up, eyes closed. His chest didn’t rise, didn’t fall.

Her dad grabbed her as if he thought she was going to lunge into the bathroom, splashing down in the water in an attempt to rouse Henry. The thought hadn’t even occurred to her. He looked so white, so apparently artificial, like a mannequin…

 _There are bananas on the windowsill_ , she thought. Their bright, curved yellowness seemed bizarre, now. They seemed like giants among all of Owen’s little herbs and bonsai trees.

“I’m okay,” she said into her dad’s shoulder.

He released her, perhaps a little reluctantly, and stood back. “I called an ambulance,” he said. “Maybe they’ll send the police. He just...”

She nodded, as if it was all too clear. “Why are you even here?”

He looked stupidly guilty then, and she knew what he was about to say. “Owen asked me to check up on him. I should’ve come earlier.” He moved his shoulder as if he’d wrenched it, and maybe he had, getting Henry out of the tub… He stank, she knew that much. Vomit and urine and who knew what else, hopefully not all his.

“Owen…” It seemed silly to have argued at all, let alone about a man who was such a good roommate he cleaned under the beds, but more so with Henry lying dead just a few feet away. She took the phone from her dad’s hand. “Owen?”

“Yes?” She imagined him and Mike in a hotel room somewhere, waiting on every word.

“My dad’s okay. I guess… I guess we should just sit here and wait for the ambulance, and then I’ll get him cleaned up.”

It occurred to her that perhaps she should have been crying. Her dad wasn’t, but then he never did, at least not where she could see. The last time someone she’d been close to had died, she’d been three years old. Maybe the loss, the reality of it, would hit her in the middle of the night and she’d sob and scream. Maybe.

“He said his shoulder hurt.”

She watched him rub at it absently. “Yeah…” It was kind of weird. Her dad never complained about anything, and he’d done himself a couple of legitimate injuries rowing when they’d lived in Cambridge. But people responded to tragedy in lots of weird ways. Maybe this would at least make sure he started paying attention to his health and taking the pills she was almost certain he… 

“Owen?” Now the nausea was hitting. “What do you do if someone’s having a heart attack?”

Her dad looked at her, was about to protest, and said nothing. Of course he hadn’t been taking his fucking pills. He’d been smoking too much, dating a kid, and thinking he was going to live forever.

“Give him some aspirin.” Mike’s voice.

Jesus Christ, how long did it take an ambulance to get here? Probably a long time if they thought you were already dead. “Yeah, great idea, I don’t-”

“There’s some in my top dresser drawer.” Owen.

She pulled out the drawer, digging through underwear. God, did this kid have enough pills? There was a baggie of what she assumed wasn’t oregano, then some decongestants, ibuprofen, xanax without any sort of prescription, and finally aspirin. “Tell me my dad isn’t dating the campus drug dealer.”

“I wish.” He sounded terrified.

She popped out two pills – was that enough? – and shoved them into her dad’s hand. “Take them. And sit down. There is no fucking way I’m losing you too.”

***

In the hotel room, Schwartz watched Owen staring at his phone on the bed. Meat had come back out of the bathroom and was sitting on the other bed wordlessly. Schwartz had no idea how he would even begin to explain. He couldn’t trust himself to say the words.

He squeezed Owen’s shoulder and took his phone, hanging up the call and making a new one. “Hi, my name’s Michael Schwartz. My baseball team’s booked on a flight heading out to Milwaukee on Sunday morning. I really need to switch two tickets to the earliest possible… Yeah, exactly. Thanks.”

Meat stared. Owen looked up with wide gray eyes.

“We have to go back,” Schwartz said, covering the mouthpiece.

Owen nodded.

“We have a championship game tomorrow,” Meat said, as if they didn’t all know it.

“Yeah, so you’ll have to do without me and the Buddha.”

Meat looked between them. “Want to explain this?”

Schwartz shook his head. “If I tell you, you’ll have to tell everyone, and no one will want to play.”

“Then you should tell us.” Meat spread his hands. “Mike, come on here. At worst we’re runners up nationally. That’s a lot better than we’ve ever done. What’s going on?”

“Skrimmer’s dead.” The words were out and he couldn’t take them back. He sucked in some air. “My girlfriend needs me, and Owen’s boyfriend needs him, and we have to go.”

The clerk was back on the line. He checked his watch. “Yeah? Shit. Okay, I guess we can make it.”

He hung up. Meat was still staring at him. “Owen’s boyfriend?” he asked. He had probably heard Affenlight’s voice on the phone. Well, screw it. 

Schwartz pulled his bag out from underneath the bed. “There’s a flight tonight we can get on. But we have to leave pretty much immediately. Personally I’d wait till we’re gone to tell Starblind.”

Starblind, really, was the least of their problems. “We have to tell Henry’s parents,” he said to Owen. “And Sophie.”

He missed the days when Owen was eternally calm and composed. “Guert?”

“Yeah?”

“Have you told anyone about Henry? Someone should inform his family.”

Pella’s voice broke in: “Can’t we worry about that later?”

“I only called the ambulance,” Affenlight said. “And you. I don’t think Henry’s parents would really appreciate hearing from me.”

Schwartz and Owen exchanged a puzzled glance. Granted Affenlight was probably feeling terrible, but there was no better representative of the college once the doctors gave him the all-clear. “Why not?” Owen asked.

There was a pause.

“Why not?” Pella’s voice.

“Because they might think that I killed him.”

***

Affenlight had always assumed, when he’d cared to think about it at all, that a heart attack was a swift and devastating occurrence. His father had simply dropped dead while heading out one morning to survey his dairy pastures. His brother George had died in his sleep. There had been no sitting around with the bitter taste of aspirin in his mouth, wondering whether his daughter was going to be made an orphan.

And he’d been an _idiot_. Anyone with his family history should have read up, should have diligently taken the pills and monitored his diet. He should’ve gone rowing again on the lake, or at least gone to the gym regularly. Lately it seemed as though he’d been surviving mainly on cigarettes, scotch, and thoughts of Owen – and that itself sent a stabbing pain through his chest. Unless that was just the actual pain of a dying heart.

“Why on earth would anyone think you killed Henry?” Pella was looking at him intently, squeezing his hand. His beautiful daughter. He truly doubted that willpower could influence blood clots or narrowed arteries, but if it could he’d stay alive for her. 

“His parents saw us,” he said. “At the motel.”

On the phone there was a murmur of shock. “Oh Guert.”

Pella simply looked stunned. “You went to a motel. With Owen.”

He knew all too well how bad it sounded. “I couldn’t be with him anywhere else.”

Owen’s voice came through on the phone: “It was my idea, Pella.”

“I don’t care whose idea it was!” She pushed coppery strands of hair out of her eyes. “So they told the deans, is that it? You’re fired? Didn’t I tell you this was exactly what was going to happen?”

No, she hadn’t, but he’d known anyway. He’d known the risks, the ultimate price he might have to pay, and he’d still ridden in that ambulance two months ago, still kissed Owen by moonlight, still made love to him in that motel. And he knew he would do it all over again.

“Guert?”

He wanted to hug them both now and tell them everything was going to be okay, even though there was a dead boy in the next room and his heart was giving up on him beat by beat. More than that, he wanted them to tell him the same thing.

“They asked for my resignation. If I fight it there’ll be an inquiry and it’ll just end up the same way.”

“It doesn’t have to.” Owen was hundreds of miles away, but Affenlight could still imagine the light in his eyes. “We’ll make it a civil rights issue. It’s ludicrous that you’re being fired for _dating_ someone. We’re both consenting adults and there’s absolutely no evidence of real professional misconduct. If I were some fifty-year-old woman would we even be having this conversation?”

He had a point, but not a good one. “It doesn’t matter,” Affenlight said wearily. “Even if I win it reflects badly on the college. I don’t want that.”

Pella looked about as livid as Owen sounded. “The college that’s firing you for falling in love? Sure, let’s protect _their_ best interests. Assholes. You’re the best president they’ve ever had.”

He smiled and squeezed her hand. “You’re both very sweet. But I still need to resign.”

“How are you feeling?”

“I’m okay, O. I think I’m okay.”

“Mike’s found us a flight home. We’re going to leave as soon as the paramedics come, and we should be home in the very early hours of the morning. I assume they’ll take you to St. Anne’s, but we’ll call Pella when we get in.”

“Okay.” He hated that they would miss their game, but surely it wasn’t all for him. They would do the same thing if he was fine. But he suspected they were all trying to keep their minds off Henry.

“Guert? When I was fourteen you saved my life and we didn’t even know each other. And now that we’re friends… I don’t know what any of us would do without you.”

It hurt, but he found himself smiling regardless. “I love you.” The words seemed to go out into a vacuum. It was horrible, horrible to say it now, but if he could conceivably drop dead at any moment like his father or brother, any words might be his last. He wanted to make them count.

***

“Did you mean it?”

Almost nothing of the United States could be seen at night, above the clouds, but Owen had spent most of the flight staring out of the window anyway, his forehead lightly bumping against the frame. The plane was quiet, largely populated by business travelers, with plenty of empty seats. It felt as though they’d briefly popped out of the world.

He looked round at Mike, who clarified: “What you said to Affenlight, about him saving your life.”

“Oh.” 

When they’d finally hung up and left the hotel, Guert and Pella had been safely in the hands of the paramedics and there was nothing more they could do by phone. Pella had said she would call if anything happened, and while they waited in the airport he’d been terrified of either one of their cells breaking into beeps or chimes. 

“Maybe it’s a little dramatic,” Owen said, adjusting his glasses, “but I was a very dramatic fourteen-year-old. I’d known I was gay for years, and it wasn’t _such_ a bad situation, in a big city with a liberal mother and a good school, but it absolutely terrified me. There were so many ways I already didn’t fit in, I didn’t need another one. And much as I knew it had to be a stereotype, the idea of lots of faceless, meaningless sex didn’t appeal. I wanted _love_ and _meaning_. And I found it, strange to say, in a book about nineteenth century letters.”

Mike smiled. “It’s a good book.”

“It’s brilliant. I had a bit of a crush on its author for a while… You know Guert takes a very good picture. He’s the reason I looked up Westish and applied for the scholarship, but I knew he didn’t teach, didn’t really publish anymore. Still, it was a free education at a good school.”

“He’s the reason I applied too.” Mike shifted a little in his seat. “He gave this beautiful, raw speech about Emerson. Not many lecturers can even hold people’s attention, let alone actually inspire them. I don’t know why he’s not on TV.”

“He doesn’t like TV. And anyway, Thoreau probably wouldn’t approve.”

Television made him think of the motel, of Guert’s head nestled against his shoulder as they half-watched a sitcom Owen hadn’t wanted to admit was actually funny. Guert’s breath against his skin, Guert’s hand around him, Guert’s mouth…

He breathed in and leaned his head back against the wall, biting the inside of his bottom lip, begging himself not to cry.

“He’s going to be okay.” Mike’s hand pressed down on his thigh by the knee, weighty and reassuring.

Owen nodded.

“You know, that night you took a baseball to the face? We all sat around the ER waiting to hear if you were okay. Henry was pretty much bouncing off the ceiling he was so nervous. Feeling guilty, I guess. Affenlight really helped calm him down. Calm us all down. Of course I just thought he was being an adult… He’s the school president, it’s like he’s our dad, he’s got to look after us. I didn’t know you and he…”

“We weren’t. Not then.” Owen rubbed his palm over his eyes and sucked in some recirculated cabin air. It felt important to make the distinction, to clarify that Guert had been there because he was concerned about a student, not because he was tearing up inside worrying about his boyfriend. But that wasn’t quite true, was it? They’d been having private meetings for four weeks by then, and if those meetings had been entirely professional why had Owen spent hours thinking about them and oh-so-casually mentioned that he was on the baseball team? He’d sat in the dugout that evening, eyes lifting occasionally to scan the crowd, wondering if Guert would show up and if they could find some excuse to talk. They’d been friends, if nothing else, and that nothing else had quite rapidly evolved into much more.

He looked sidelong at Mike. There were defenses he badly wanted to raise, to justify their relationship and ward off any thoughts of ethical wrongdoing or psychologically dubious motives… Tell anyone about a college president in his sixties conducting an affair with a twenty-one-year-old student and minds would jump to conclusions. Perhaps some of those conclusions would even be correct. But none of them could approach how good and sweet and _right_ it felt to make love to Guert, to joke with him on the phone after games, to wake up with him in the morning and lie around in an unmade bed, reading Whitman to each other between kisses and coffee cups.

“Guert told me something about the soul once,” he said instead. “That it’s not something you have, but something you build in your every waking moment, through every effort and error you make, as though your life were a novel constructed of every thought you ever had. Which is why it’s important to live deliberately, to say what you mean.”

He’d never worried about Guert’s job because that was Guert’s responsibility, and he’d assumed that Guert had calmly weighed the risks and decided they were being careful enough. Perhaps he should have known from the very start that Guert had fallen for him so fast and so devastatingly, confusingly hard that he could never have stopped himself.

Mike nodded. “If I’d never met Henry, he’d still be alive.”

Around them, people slept or read. Somewhere out in the blackness of the night, Pella and Guert were waiting for them. Somewhere, Henry’s body was cold and alone. All the light had gone out of Mike’s amber eyes.

Owen took Mike’s hand in his.

***

Fucking hospitals.

Pella badly wanted to pace, or to dart out to find a coffee machine or something that might keep her mind off just how horrible it was to see her dad in a hospital bed, hooked up to monitors. Most people could probably trace their hatred of hospitals to some sort of early childhood experience with a dying grandparent. Pella had never had that – all four of her grandparents had been dead before she’d been born, and her mother had died in an accident an ocean away. Her dad had been the picture of health throughout her childhood, and she’d never been quite enough of a rambunctious tomboy to break anything.

She still hated them. Still wanted some coffee and a cigarette, even though she didn’t really smoke, even though it was her dad’s smoking that had probably landed him here in the first place. Well, that and genetics. Mostly genetics.

It was long past visiting hours and they’d told her to go home and let her dad sleep. But Mike had called from the airport in Milwaukee about two hours ago, and she didn’t want to leave before the guys got here. Besides, what was she supposed to go home to? Her apartment with its memories of a dead boy? Her father’s place without her father?

Her foot tapped anxiously against the floor, and her dad squeezed her hand. “You should get some sleep.” He looked so naked in that hospital gown, his hair mussed, his gray eyes tired. 

“They’ll be here soon.”

The hospital corridors were so quiet at this time of night that she could hear them long before they appeared at the door – voices counting off numbers, directing each other – and then they were there, Mike and Owen, like some kind of comedy odd couple. They looked about as awful as she felt.

“Hi,” she said, raising her free hand.

Mike lifted his hand in greeting too, a cautious half-smile on his lips. Owen just dropped the bag from his shoulder and went to her dad, one knee up on the bed, gathering him up into his arms. It was the first time she’d ever seen them touch, the first time she’d ever seen her dad kiss a man, his hand leaving hers as he hugged Owen tightly, stroking his hair. 

Some part of her still wanted to be shocked and indignant, not because her dad was gay or bi or whatever the hell he was, but because he’d lied to her, because he was dating a student who was forty years younger than him. But they’d already had that fight, and the worst had already happened, and now she was just happy that he had someone, someone who could hold him and whisper to him, as Owen was doing now, someone for whom he didn’t have to be so strong and stoic. 

She glanced round at Mike, who inclined his head back toward the door. “Let’s give them a minute,” he said in a whisper.

The corridor outside was as lonely and silently fluorescent as she expected, but it seemed all right now that he was here, even if he looked as tired and drained as she did. Worse.

“How’s your dad doing?”

Pella fidgeted, stared down at their feet. “He’s okay. I mean, they’re still figuring out if they’re going to do surgery, but he’s going to be okay.”

When he touched her arm and left his hand there, she didn’t pull away.

“What… Um. What happened with Henry?”

It was easier to deal with relating the news than dwelling on any of it: “The paramedics woke up half the campus, and one of those admin guys was there, you know, the deans? He said he’d get in touch with Henry’s parents.”

Mike rubbed his stubbly jaw. “I should probably call too, in the morning.”

“The cops asked my dad a lot of stuff, but it’s pretty clear… I mean, I don’t think anyone seriously thinks my dad could’ve had anything to do with it.” There had been judging looks when it came to mentioning Owen, but it was a small town. Judging looks came with the territory. “If he hadn’t gone to check on him, Henry would still be lying there…”

He would have stayed lying there until Owen got back from the game in a couple of days. Or maybe until this evening, when Pella would have gone to leave him soup and noticed that the chowder was still there and started threatening to break down the door. She didn’t really want to think about either option, or what might have happened to her dad if he’d been having chest pains alone in his apartment and decided to go to bed instead of calling Owen. You could play the “what if” game forever and never be satisfied.

She wasn’t sure, not absolutely, which of them was hugging the other, but he looked so miserable, so empty – a perfect reflection of the way she felt – that it was absolutely perfect having his arms around her again, and her arms around him even though whatever comfort she could give him felt minuscule. If she’d envied her dad having Owen to hold and comfort him, at least she had Mike, and Mike was very definitely not an “at least” sort of option.

“I’m sorry,” she said. For Henry. For abandoned hopes and quickly seized-upon fears. For whatever reason they were standing in a cold, sterile hospital corridor in the tiny hours of the night.

Mike kissed her temple and rubbed her back, warming her up. He smelled of sweat and coffee. She wanted to drag him home, wherever home was, and tell herself that a good night’s sleep and a shower and a hearty breakfast would make everything all right. But in the morning her dad would still have been fired, and Henry would still be dead. None of them even had homes to go to anymore.

The two of them found the fabled coffee machine and fed it quarters to get plastic cups for each of them, and one more for Owen. Her dad was banned from caffeine for the rest of his life, along with any other vaguely pleasurable substance she could name.

When they got back to the room, Owen was snuggled up on the narrow bed alongside her dad, their arms around each other, foreheads touching as they talked. The nurses would probably shoo him out in a second, if they laid eyes on this sort of scene.

“Hi President Affenlight,” Mike said. Her father’s presence always seemed to make him devolve into a blushing, shoe-scuffing caricature of a nervous boyfriend. “How’re you feeling?”

Her dad smiled. “Guert,” he said. “And much better than I would be without the three of you, I suspect. That said, you should all go home. Nothing’s going to happen to me here, and you look exhausted.”

“I can’t go home,” Owen said. Pella wondered if his room would literally be bedecked in crime scene tape by now. Even if it wasn’t, she understood why he wouldn’t want to sleep in the place his friend had just died, let alone shower in the bathtub.

“You can stay in my room. Pella, you can let him in.”

“Sure. Right.” She nodded, Mike taking her hand in his. “Maybe I’ll… I think I might crash there too, tonight. But are you sure you’re going to be okay?”

“Sweetheart, I’m already in the hospital. If anything happens, which I’m sure it won’t, I’ll be fine.”

Much as she didn’t want to be alone, she didn’t want her dad to be either. But she and Owen could come back in a few hours. They’d bring him some real, non-hospital food, and then they could talk about all the things that seemed far too big to talk about now.

She let Owen extricate himself from the wires of the various monitors and kiss her dad goodbye before she went to hug him. Maybe when they figured everything out she’d allow herself to be mad at him again.

***

The campus was dark and almost silent by the time they arrived back, the chapel bells gently tolling as Pella keyed in the code for the private entrance to Scull Hall. Schwartz glanced up at the darkened windows of Phumber 405 and caught Owen doing the same. Henry had probably been taken to a morgue somewhere – St. Anne’s? Or did they have a police facility elsewhere in the county? Presumably there would be an autopsy, an inquest, to figure out how an apparently healthy college athlete had managed to die alone in a bathtub. Henry’s parents would be distraught, and probably rightfully furious – with him, with Affenlight, with everyone. Henry had been sick and they’d all known it, and yet they’d all abandoned him, innocently trusting that he’d be okay until the championship was over.

Pella pushed the door open and flicked on the light in the stairwell. “Come on,” she said.

He and Owen only had their game bags with them, but his legs felt leaden as they climbed the stairs. In the study, Pella poured each of them a half-tumbler of scotch without asking and sat down heavily on the couch. How was it possible for someone to look so very young and so very old at the same time, both vulnerable and weary beyond words?

Owen sat down beside her, and how old was he? Twenty-one? He had that fuzzy tournament stubble on his jawline, but he still looked like a kid. They sipped their scotches in unintentional unison, and Schwartz saw no reason not to join them. 

Toasting Henry’s memory seemed like a trite idea now. There would be a funeral sooner or later, probably not here but out in South Dakota where his family was from. If Schwartz had just gone off with the rest of the team on the day of that Peoria game, if he’d never spoken to Henry, Henry would probably still be alive now. He would be a small-town metalworker with no college credits and no hope of playing professional baseball, but he’d be alive. 

In a couple of hours, not long at all, the Harpooners were going to wake up and try to play a championship game without their captain and without Owen, and of course the news about Henry would filter through to them somehow, via Meat or friends back on campus. The championship had been the one thing Schwartz still had to look forward to, the one honor he could still win. Now, even if the team somehow prevailed in his absence, he had nothing.

“They kept us waiting for ages,” Pella said finally, talking mostly at her glass. “So I got my dad to talk to me, you know, to keep him awake and make sure he was okay. I think it’s the most talking we’ve done in forever. I told him all about David and what I did for four years, which basically meant talking about how completely crazy I was most of the time. My deepest, darkest secrets were all about depression and anxiety, which isn’t exactly all that deep and dark. I mean, who _isn’t_ in therapy these days? And my dad told me what his dark secret was, which seems basically to be about letting a boy kiss him in the moonlight. Which, you know. Fuck. I wish I had a first kiss story like that.”

Schwartz shifted his weight awkwardly and let another mouthful of scotch slosh around behind his teeth. 

Pella chewed on her lip, turned to Owen. “You’re not what I would’ve imagined for my dad. I mean, you’re nothing like anyone he’s ever dated. He definitely never dated a baseball player before. But you’re smart and you’re kind and you make him happy, which is great. He needs that. And if you break his heart, I swear I will break your face all over again.”

Owen smiled. With one change in his expression, one alteration of light and shadow, he could seem almost unfathomably wise, serene and capable. He leaned over and softly kissed Pella’s cheek. “I think I’ll turn in. Wake me when you’re getting up tomorrow?”

He rose from the couch, setting down his empty glass before giving Schwartz a brief but warm hug. Schwartz patted him on the back. And then he was gone, padding down the hallway to Affenlight’s room, which left Schwartz alone with Pella and the entire presidential scotch collection. Even though it was just what he would have asked for on an evening like this, he was far from content.

“That was nice, what you said,” he told her, sitting down on the couch cushion Owen had vacated. “He’s a good guy. A good man.”

“Yeah, the best.” Pella knocked back the rest of her scotch and set down the tumbler. “But my dad’s out of a job and a home, and Owen’s going to Japan, and where does that leave us?”

“Maybe he won’t go.” Not like that would solve much.

“Maybe we’ll go back to Harvard and my dad can start rowing again and dating every eligible woman in the state. And I’ll enroll in remedial chemistry or something and re-take my SATs.”

Schwartz considered the rest of his scotch. “I’ll probably go back to Chicago. Get a job as a paralegal. Maybe tend bar.”

“My dad did that, about thirty years ago.”

“Yeah? If it was twenty-five years ago he could be _my_ dad.”

Pella looked at him appraisingly, as if searching for signs of her father in his face. And then she burst into hiccuping giggles. “Oh god. No. Totally not. Although I don’t look much like him either. He’s some kind of genetic anomaly in our family: dark eyes, dark complexion, impossibly good hair. I think the Affenlights found him abandoned in a field somewhere.”

Schwartz ran a hand back over his own hair, which was far from impossibly good and in fact rapidly vanishing. “Things’ll seem better tomorrow.”

“Yeah? I don’t see how. I mean, unless Henry wakes up in the morgue and the deans decide my dad is so awesome they don’t mind him dating a student, and some sort of magic knits his heart back together.” She sighed. “I should read up on heart attacks, but I think it might scare me more than it does already.”

He swung an arm around her and she leaned back into him. “He’ll be fine. They got it early, and he has you and Owen to look after him.”

“Yeah, me and Owen.” She closed her eyes, smiling. “Too bad Wisconsin hasn’t approved gay marriage yet. I’d like to see someone make an honest man of my dad. And it might be fun to have a step-parent who’s younger than I am.”

“Say any of that around Owen and you’ll give him a heart attack.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Anyway, he’ll have to tell his mother all of this tomorrow. Tell me you wouldn’t want to hear _that_ conversation.”

She was almost impossibly beautiful. Schwartz kissed her and she kissed him back. By the time their lips parted, he had to cast around for whatever the subject of their conversation had been. “I think we’d better go to bed.” By which he didn’t necessarily mean _her_ bed – this was a perfectly good couch.

But she opened her eyes again and looked at him and nodded. “Yeah, we’d better,” she said, standing up and tugging him with her as if she could actually hope to budge his weight.

Her room was spacious and cozy all at once, lovely old wood with an airy feel, like a rural guest house designed to attract writers and artists in the spring. It had precisely none of her things in it, she was staying somewhere in town now, but this was her father’s home and therefore hers too.

Schwartz sat down on the bed and took off his shoes. He felt both that they were supposed to have sex, in some sort of post-war life-affirming fashion, and that to do so would be a travesty, because Henry was dead and this was Pella’s dad’s home, and Owen was right down the hall. Did he even have condoms? Pella’s dad must have some. But there was no way he was going to start riffling around in President Affenlight’s underwear drawer. 

“I’m setting the alarm for eight,” Pella said, her phone beeping. “That way we can probably shower and get dressed before all hell descends on us.”

She had stripped down to her underwear and Westish t-shirt, so he did the same. “All hell?”

“The deans, the cops, Henry’s parents, Owen’s mother, your entire baseball team…”

She was right. Tonight had, more or less, been just about the four of them. Tomorrow the whole world would force itself into their lives, demanding explanations and justifications, chastising and haranguing them, and possibly much worse where Affenlight was concerned.

“It’ll be okay,” he said, switching off the light. 

Her body was soft and warm under the covers, and she wrapped herself around him as though the last couple of weeks had been nothing at all, just a minor aberration in a relationship that could never be anything other than loving. As though they really were family.

In the morning they’d wake up and figure things out. Schwartz would go and get Owen’s clothes for him from Phumber 405, Pella would deal with the deans, and Owen could stand up to whatever accusations the tiny might of the Westish police department decided to throw Affenlight’s way. The Harpooners would be upset, but they’d reached a major national final for the first time in their history. Owen’s mom would be upset too, but she was Owen’s mom, and Schwartz suspected she’d grown used to her son’s often baffling life choices.

In a week or two they’d bury Henry, which was the sort of desperately sad occasion Schwartz couldn’t even bring himself to imagine yet. But it would be done somehow, somewhere. And somehow, somewhere, the rest of them would have to go on living.

Maybe Owen would go to Tokyo and maybe Affenlight would go with him, or perhaps they’d both stay here, Affenlight biding his time until Owen graduated and the two of them could go and live wherever artistically-minded gay couples lived. New York, maybe, or Cambridge, or a log cabin out by a lake in the middle of nowhere.

Pella might decide to stick around at Westish, and he might take that coaching job in order to stick around with her. It would be decent money and better than bartending, and it wouldn’t be forever. Or, if she hated the place that much, they could both go to Chicago. They’d do the sort of shitty jobs young couples do while he studied for the LSAT again and applied to more sensible colleges, and they’d work their way up until she was a famous whatever she wanted to be, and he was yet another Jewish governor. If there were other options, he didn’t want to consider them.

Whatever happened, though, Henry Skrimshander would remain barely a footnote in the athletic history of a second-rate college on the shores of Lake Michigan, a cautionary tale told by agents for a few years, a mythical hero Schwartz might tell his kids about one day: a sweet, naïve boy who had a superlative, preternatural talent the like of which no one had ever seen. 

They’d never believe him, of course, but he’d tell them anyway. A story like that? Well, it deserved to be told.


End file.
